DURIP Improved Infrastructure for Fielding Mobile Robots
Abstract
Improved Infrastructure for Fielding Mobile RobotsAgency Program Officer: Dr. Thomas McKenna, Code Division 3411.Publicly Releasable Project Summary/AbstractWe propose to purchase a mobile robot field testing station, a Boston Dynamics Spot robot with an arm, andupgrade our existing High-Powered Arms to a full Mobile Alex system. The mobile robot field testing station will be extremely enabling for field testing our robots. The Spot robot will provide a highly reliable, proven platform for mobile manipulation, autonomy, and human-machine teaming experimentation. The Mobile Alex system will provide dedicated equipment for mobile, bi-manual manipulation research, including learning and high-strength manipulation. Each of these pieces of improved equipment will enable research that is directly relevant to the long-term success of the DoD.The development of legged robots with human-level capabilities is extremelyrelevant to the mission of the DoD. Legged can function as first responders in disasters, explosive ordnance technicians, active surveillance tools, and squad members in urban operations. To develop these capabilities, however, requires significant research and development into mobility, manipulation, teaming, and control. This research will be directly enabled with this DURIP.These pieces ofequipment will be installed in the IHMC Robotics Lab, and will be available to researchers at the University of West Florida (UWF) and IHMC. The field testing station will greatly enhance the ability for field testing of robots. This is essential to performing robust experiments outside of a controlled laboratory environment, which goes a long way to validating research and developing usable DoD assets, and will help provide immediate validation of locomotion, planning, perception, and autonomy algorithms. The Spot robot will provide an additional, reliable platform for development of the algorithms necessary to make legged robots useful in the real world, including teaming, autonomy, and mobile manipulation. The Mobile Alex upgrade will be the first dedicated bi-manual manipulation platform. Improving equipment at UWF will open new avenues of research, enabling and supporting future projects and grants that are multidisciplinary by nature. It will also enable hands-on learning and research opportunities for students in a variety of departments at UWF, enhancing their learning experience, with the ability to do field testing providing a highly valuable educational resource for the development of the next generation#s workforce, with a direct eye towards fielding robots that are important for DoD and other federal missions.The acquisition of this equipment will not only open new research capabilities, but will be used to directly enhance existing DoD funded projects, including ONR projects #SquadBot: High Performance Humanoid Robot for Urban Operations , #SquadBot v2: High Performance Humanoid Robot for Urban Exploration#, and #TAC Assist: Team Aware Collaborative Assistants#, the USSOCOM project #Virtual Reality (VR) Design Workbench#, the NASA project #Mobility and Planning Algorithms for NASA JSC Valkyrie Robot#,the DAC project #Breaching and Accessing Urban Structures with Humanoid Robots#, the Army projects #Supply-Bot: Extreme Mobility Supply Robot# and #STRIDE: Sophisticated Temporal Robots for Inference-guided Decision Exploration#, the DOE project #Research and Development of Wearable Robotics to Enhance Worker Safety#, USAF project #Battlefield-Integrated Reconnaissance Drone (BIRD) with Advanced Target Recognition (ATR)#, and NSF project #Occupational Exoskeletons and the Human-Technology Partnership: Achieving Scale and Integration into the Future of Work#. These projects currently support four UWF ISR faculty, and a large number of UWF ISR PhD and Masters students, and will provide equipment for additional faculty and students.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 13, 2025
- Source ID
- N000142512055
Entities
People
- Robert G. Griffin
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of West Florida